


One Missing Sock

by izuku



Category: Welcome to Hell - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Suicide, shit im sorry about this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 08:04:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5367704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/izuku/pseuds/izuku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sock wakes up one night, covered in his parents blood, knife in his hands. Oops?</p><p>Jonathan wonders why there are police cars in front of his boyfriend's house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Missing Sock

**Author's Note:**

> so this was gonna be fluffy and then my friends got paired with me and we all know that im the angst king so here we are  
>  co-authors were my friends gina and max (we each wrote a third)
> 
> warnings: suicide, implied/referenced suicide

For most people, waking up with a knife in your hand would set off alarm bells. However, Sock isn’t like most people. The cold handle feels natural in his grasp, almost a part of him. At first, he stares blankly, puzzled by the bloodstained blade. He attempts to piece together his memories, but finds nothing after saying goodnight to his mother and father. But when his eyes fall upon the bed, he is snapped out of his daze. The gruesome sight of his parent’s bodies drive in the brutal reality of what had occurred.

Sock lets out a panicked, hollow laugh, his eyes glistening in the piercing sliver of moonlight, his face contorted into a demonic grimace. Well, Sock, you've just killed your parents. No big deal. Just keep calm. In a decision of questionable reason, he slowly opens the window. He drags the corpses through the opening, then quickly moves them to the shed. The door opens painfully slowly, with the creaking boards doing nothing to calm his nerves. He shoves his parents behind a cabinet, then flops down onto the floor.

After a few minutes, the adrenaline is gone. In its place are solely the sobering facts, and a dark torrent of emotion. As reason regains control, Sock realizes that his situation is most definitely a big deal. What is he going to do now? His parents are dead, and his violent tendencies would support the case he’d killed them in some state of semiconscious delirium. He’ll be locked away in a padded cell, his mind contorting into something even more twisted. That won't do.

The more he thinks about his crime, the more Sock realizes there is only one solution. He squints at the shelf towards the back of the barn, and sees it has what he needs. In a sudden frenzy, he quickly ties the cables together. After some brief measurements, he fastens one end to the shelf and tosses the other over an exposed rafter by the cabinet, where the roof has rotted away. Climbing onto the cabinet, he ties the loose end into a noose.

Sock’s entire body is trembling. As he slips his head into the ring, his eyes frantically flicker around the shed, as if looking for another option. Resigning himself to his sentence, he takes a deep breath and stiffens his body. He jumps, and all is quiet.

Jonathan is not having a good day. He’s overslept, the shower isn’t working, and his boyfriend isn’t answering his texts. In the universe's latest attempt to turn his life into a living hell, his neighbors are now swarming the street. At least they don’t seem to be focusing on him. Actually, he has no idea who most of these people are. Something weird is going on, and he might as well get in on it.

He storms out of the door, barely avoiding falling over after tripping over the doormat. “Universe five, Jonathan zero,” he scowls. He sighs and trudges onwards, forcing his way into the crowd. After some shoving, he is able to see that the crowd’s attention centers on Sock’s house. If something’s happened to his boyfriend…He pushes that thought aside, quickening his pace. He cuts his way past several grumbling strangers, finally emerging at the front.

It becomes apparent that the crowd has entered the property not out of courtesy, but because of the line of police tape blocking off a path to the back of the house. Jonathan cranes his neck around the corner, but can’t see anything except a couple of officers. Suddenly, a flurry of movement breaks out. An ambulance wails, stopping in front of the house. A team of paramedics rush out with…stretchers?

Jonathan’s heart whips into a frenzy as the paramedics run out of view, and he struggles to look calm. Sock is hurt. Badly, if he needs a stretcher. Jonathan’s muscles stiffen, his eyes focused on the edge of the house. Silent pleas race through his mind, attempting to fight the crushing wave of dread.

When the three stretchers return, his eyes flicker between them, desperately trying to find Sock. He finds the smallest body, and frantically scans it for signs of life as his brow breaks out in a sweat. Sock’s left hand tenses, then slowly rises. A few people gasp, the paramedics moving him pause. A light of hope flares in Jonathan’s eyes, and is promptly extinguished by a rain of tears as the hand falls limp, never to move again.

The kid running to Jonathan at a speed no one should have been capable of at their size was possibly the most terrifying thing he had seen in all of his eight years of life. But most things are terrifying when they're covered in blood. Well, covered might have been an overstatement; there was only a little on his face, and some more on his shirt, and God, how do you get blood on your shoes? So not that much, really. However, from there things had only got worse. The boy had been hiding something behind his back and now he pulled both hands forward to show the abandoned play park exactly what he was hiding. Jonathan was eight–he'd never seen anything dead before, so you couldn't blame him for screeching at the top of his lungs at the sight of the dead squirrel the boy was holding in his hands.

“Isn't it cool? I killed something!” The boy- no, the demon, grinned. He was delighted at what he’d done, but the expression fell as he watched Jonathan's face

“Hey, are you okay?” His words snapped Jonathan out of his stupor and into action. What was he thinking? This wasn't some monster, this was a kid who didn't look older than six. Jon should have been helping him.

“Am I okay!? Are you okay? You're covered in blood, did it scratch you? Can't you get rabies from that or something?”

“I'm just fine, thank you very much! And don't go treating me like I'm little. I'm eight, I can handle myself!”

Jonathan had just stared after that, he needed to be as calm as possible to keep the kid calm too. He had conveniently ignored that he was the one closer to panic out of the two of them.

It was then that he had realized that he didn't know the kid's name, he had just been “the kid” up until then.

“My name is Jonathan. Why don't you tell me yours, and then we can go somewhere and get you cleaned up. Is that okay with you?”

“Sock! My name is Sock!”

Seven years later, Sock was Jonathan's closest friend, and hopefully one day he'd be something more. Although there was no way he was going to mention it first. By “it,” he meant the way he had been looking at Sock in the way best friends aren't meant to, and how Sock had been doing it too. Or he had meant the way he and Sock lingered for too long during things that should have been just casual touches.

The real problem was that when the two of them sat together like they were just then, it became all that Jonathan could think about. I have to tell Sock. I have to tell Sock. An endless mantra of self denial that had felt like it would never stop running through Jonathan's head. But between the two of them, Sock's emotions had always been much clearer than Jonathan's ever were; and, if Sock hadn't said it yet, how could Jonathan have possibly said something so earth shattering. He was lucky Sock saved him from that just in time, he would have broken down and told him a few weeks later, anyways.

The two of them had spent so much time in Jonathan's bedroom, gone through a hundred firsts together in there but out of all of those, this one was by far the most momentous.

“Hey, Jonathan, have you heard about Jojo and Lil? They got together last week,” Sock's tone said he was trying to be casual, but he hadn't been particularly good at it then, he had gotten a lot better later, but he wasn't quite there yet, “Because, well, I was thinking, and they've been friends since forever just like us, and now they're a couple, and isn't that weird? Not weird in a bad way but a… good way I guess… and, um, isn't that different? And, yeah, you know what, I'm just going to stop now that was horrible.”

That was the fastest Jon had heard Sock get himself tongue tied in years, and that really shouldn't have been cute. It didn't help that Sock had cocooned himself in a pile of blankets against the soft gray walls of Jonathan's room, or that he was sneezing every few words from the dust rising off of the old wool blankets.

“Okay, I'm going to start again now,” This time Sock sounded a little more sure of whatever it is he wanted to say; and if the trend from what Sock had been saying is what he thought it was, well, Jonathan certainly wanted to hear him to the end. So he could wait for a little longer until his best friend could compose himself.

“I-I really, really…. ” Sock trailed off, unable to finish what he had to say and too close to giving up. This time, Jonathan was certain he knew what Sock meant. Even if it was only a few words, he was confident in his ability to know what Sock meant in between the things he said and the things he didn't. So this time, he had to be the one to take action. He couldn’t put all the weight on his best friend, his maybe something more, so with all the determination he could muster, he leant down and kissed Sock.

 

Jonathan’s eyes snap open as he’s pulled out of the memories, his cheeks damp with tears. As he takes shuddering breaths inwards, he sits back in his bed, clutching at the sheets. Sock can’t be dead. There’s no way. They’ve gone through too much together for Sock to just leave him, for him to just go and die. He remembers Sock’s face, the look of pain that marred his features from the rope burns on his neck, and then…

Nothing.

Then the light faded from Sock’s eyes, the usually bright and happy boy a shell, empty of everything. The last breath had slipped from Sock’s lips, and the quirky, fun boy was dead. His blood stopped pumping, heart stopped beating, dead. Except he couldn’t be. He couldn’t have possibly decided to leave Jon all by himself, all alone and sitting in his room and crying his eyes out, there’s no way Sock could have done that.

But he did. He did, and now Jonathan is here, doing just that. Jonathan’s heart is shattered, his emotions in shambles, and he wonders how he’ll go on. That weird, funny, exciting boy was his sun, and he’s in the dark without him.

Jonathan’s mind spins and spins, but eventually, once his eyelids are heavy and his brain fried, he drifts off into a restless slumber.

Jonathan doesn’t go to school the next day. His mother has already left the house by the time he wakes up, and his body is too heavy with lethargy to lift out of his bed. So there he stays, tossing and turning and wrapping the covers tightly around himself, trying to ignore the sadness that’s burning a hole in his head. He fails.

He can’t get the image out of his mind. Sock’s body tensing, just for a moment, then going limp. The paramedics were shouting, trying to bring him back, but it was no use. The goofy boy with the ridiculous name- Napoleon Maxwell Sowachowski, Sock for short- was dead. Is dead. Jon finds it hard to think about. At some point, he passes out, whether it’s due to exhaustion or melancholy, he has no idea, but he takes it gratefully.

Sock is still pretty confused as to what’s happening. He knows that he’s dead, he knows what his job is, but he wants to know why. Why this, why for him? Of all the demons in Hell, Mephistopheles just had to choose him.

As Sock recalls, the words that the man had said were, _“First jobs are always rough, kid, but you’ve gotta get through it to make it to the big leagues.”_ Then he’d flashed a winning smile and sent Sock up to the surface.

And here he is, standing–well, floating–outside of Jon’s house. He doesn’t want to go in. In fact, he’d rather have this job for anyone else in the world except his boyfriend. Of course, he doesn’t mind the opportunity to spend time with him, get to see him, but that’s not really the point, is it?

_“Just get the job done, then move on. No big deal, right?”_

Sock phases through Jonathan’s front door, unable to interact with physical objects. As he carefully moves through the empty home, he hears a faint sniffling coming from upstairs. Sock quietly floats up the staircase, towards the noise.

_“If you can’t finish the job, then you’re fired.”_

Sock finds his way to the door of Jonathan’s bedroom, the apparent source of the noise, and ever-so-carefully phases through it. He’s greeted with the sight of the blonde boy curled up on his bed and crying, eyes red and nose running. Something twinges in Sock’s chest and he lets out a soft gasp; quiet, but loud enough to be heard by his boyfriend.

_“Remember to take it slow at first. Rushing these things is no fun.”_

Jonathan’s eyes widen in shock as his gaze is pulled towards the source of the noise, and he barely refrains from screaming.

“S-Sock?” He yelps, jumping back from the floating boy. Sock smiles sadly.

“Yup, it’s me.” He murmurs in reply, concern tinging his eyes. “I, uh, I’m dead, in case you didn’t know, though I assume you did.” He continues, gesturing at Jon’s position on his bed.

Jonathan nods. “So why can I see you?” He says, fear in his voice.

“Ah, well, it’s kind of a funny story.” Sock replies, scratching the back of his neck.

_“Once you’re finished, you’ll be given a new assignment, so the faster you get it done, the sooner you get to move on.”_

“Y’see, I’m sort of a demon now.”  Sock finishes awkwardly, averting his eyes from Jonathan.

“You’re what?” Jon demands, standing up from his bed to get closer to the other boy.

“A, uh, a demon.” Sock says, swallowing his rising anxiety. “I mean, I killed my parents, killed myself.” He mumbles.

_“I figured this was right up your alley, considering how you got here.”_

Sock guiltily looks down at Jonathan, his heart heavy at the prospect of what he has to do. He would rather die a thousand times over than go through with this job, but there’s nothing else he can do.

Sock sinks until his feet rest on the ground, and he moves forward to wrap his arms around his boyfriend, his lovely Jonathan with his still-beating heart. Jon is warm, and he hugs Sock back, holding him close.

“I’m so sorry.” Sock whispers into his chest.

_“Your job is to make him kill himself.”_

 

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you guys enjoyed this! we had a fun time writing it (except when we couldn't contact gina for like 4 days that was not fun)
> 
> by the way, how we split up the writing was: 1st part by max, flashbacks by gina, and the end by yours truly.
> 
> feedback/opinions in the comments are always appreciated!


End file.
